On the train ride home, the teenage girl across from me is sitting underneath an ad for a med spa that reads, “Sculpt your curves.” I can tell she’s watching a weightlifting tutorial for juicier glutes from the reflection of her TikTok feed in her glasses. I look down at my phone only to be met with an eerily similar TikTok, followed by another one. And another one. On the walk from my subway station to my apartment, I pass the Pilates studio I frequented when I had the budget for it; its once-diverse clientele leans a lot more snatched now that my Brooklyn neighborhood is an influencer destination. At the construction site on my corner, massive athletic gear ads have just been plastered across the green scaffolding shed; all the female models bare their gleaming white smiles while running (can’t relate), happy to be exercising their muscular-but-not-unladylike limbs. Someone’s trying to sell me a “better” body at every waking minute of my day.
I arrive home to stacks of unopened boxes, including the dozens of body care products I’d been assigned to test for Allure’s Best of Beauty Awards. I take a box cutter to all of them, feeling the rush I always get when opening a new beauty product despite the fact that I do it many times per day. My job’s a blessing in the sense that I’ve always come to beauty when I’ve been judged or excluded elsewhere because of my body’s size—not having to worry about “fitting into” a product is thrilling to me. But my rush dies instantly when I pull out a bottle labeled “Tight and Tone Body Serum.” Another is called “Dynamic Skin Sculptor.” There’s a “ProSculpt” balm, a “Resculpt” serum, and even one called a “Body Reform Treatment.”
I set them all aside to use over the next few weeks, but first I open the spreadsheet where our staff registers all our testing notes. “Hate this based on the name alone,” I write in several slots. I sigh and shut the laptop, maybe a little too aggressively.
Because, look, the body care industry has a problem right now. Over time, it seems to have learned what people’s biggest body insecurities are, pointed a finger directly at those insecurities, and told people their products can change the “problem”—when most people just want to moisturize. In a multi-billion dollar industry like beauty, product names are not chosen without a calculated marketing strategy, and these days, the names of body serums, creams, and other topical treatments are increasingly likely to tell us they can tighten, tone, firm, shape, sculpt, lift, and even reform our bodies, all under the sneaky implication that our bodies need to be changed at all.